GREENLAND — Seacoast Media Group Executive Editor Howard Altschiller on Thursday gave Rotarians an inside glimpse at what it’s like working in the fast-paced work environment of a newsroom.

“It’s like triage all the time,” Altschiller said before a packed crowd of Rotarians and their guests.

Altschiller, who has been executive editor at SMG since 2003, was the featured speaker at the Portsmouth Rotary Club’s weekly luncheon at the Portsmouth Country Club in Greenland.

As the longest serving editor at the Portsmouth Herald since legendary local Ray Brighton ran the paper in the late 1960s into the early ’70s, Altschiller said SMG has been through many changes over the past decade. With a staff of 29 full-time reporters, photographers and editors, Altschiller said the best word to describe his newsroom today is “resilient.”

Altschiller said perhaps the biggest reason he feels the local papers have been able to maintain readership throughout all of that change has been the ability of his staff to remain committed to the communities they cover.

“The news team is resilient because we’re deeply connected to the communities we serve,” he said.

When he was first approached about speaking at the Rotary luncheon, Altschiller said he was asked to describe what a day in his life is like.

“That is really impossible because every day is entirely different,” he explained. “That’s what I love about my job, you just never know what a day is going to bring when you wake up in the morning.”

As a former reporter, Altschiller said one of his favorite aspects of working in the news business is the opportunity to meet new people and learn new things.

“If you’re somebody who loves learning, this is the greatest job in the world,” he said.

In addition to its daily newspaper, the Portsmouth Herald, Seacoast Media Group publishes twice-weekly newspapers, the Exeter News-Letter and the Hampton Union, in New Hampshire, and the weekly newspapers, The York Weekly and York County Coast Star, in Maine. It also publishes the weekly entertainment magazine Spotlight and runs Seacoastonline.com.

The company is owned by Fortress Investment Group, which is the principal shareholder of GateHouse Media, one of the largest publishers of locally based print and online media in the United States.